I started fishing again to be alone. The immediate impetus was the COVID crisis when social distancing became the norm and being alone at water’s edge was one of the few places I didn’t need to worry about wearing a mask. But I came to really enjoy the solitude for other reasons. As an activist, a teacher, and a parent, there are always e-mails to respond to, meetings to attend, classes to teach, and sibling fights to referee. It’s an ongoing, and continuous, conversation. I enjoy the silence of fishing. Fish don’t talk, and they don’t want to be spoken to. (Although I do usually say a few words to them before I release them or, if I plan on eating them, before I stun and bleed them out). In this silence, I listen to the other sounds around me: the lap of the water, the scurrying of an unseen animal in the brush, the laugh of seagulls or honking of ducks, the truck upshifting as it makes the climb on the highway nearby. Against this natural white noise, and with my physical movements engaged in the regular rhythms of casting and retrieving, my mind wanders: going to spaces and stopping at places it’s usually too busy to go, or going nowhere, simply resting, before I go back into to the world.
Activism and organizing, almost by definition, are collective activities. Social change does not happen because of a Great Leader doing a Great Act, it happens because lots of people, working together, do lots of things over and over, collecting more and more people with them as they go. This is exciting, but it can also be exhausting, especially for someone who is a bit of an introvert like myself. When planning for an action or working in a social movement, it’s really easy to get sucked in as every spare minute is spent meeting or talking or strategizing with someone. And then there are those times in history where the world explodes, and you are out on the street marching and protesting with masses of people every day. All this is good, but in my four decades of activism I have seen many, many activists get so caught up in the movement (and urged by their comrades to do so) that they forget to take care of themselves, they forget to make time to be by themselves. They burn out, and eventually, inevitably, they quit. A good activist needs time to be inactive. A good community organizer needs space to be away from the community. Making time and space to be alone is essential for coming back and working together.